Saving virgins,saving the USA: heteronormative masculinities and the securitisation of trafficking discourse in mainstream narrative film

Sex trafficking has become a high-profile, celebrity endorsed issue, attracting much international attention. Accompanying this has been a proliferation of films, including full-length feature films, which address the topic and have done much to influence public perception of the issue. This paper analyses two of these films which were made for the mainstream US market: Trade and Taken. Both films present a conservative and heteronormative perspective revolving around middle-aged North American law enforcement officers rescuing innocent young girls. Hence, these films participate in the general securitisation of trafficking discourse in which the US has been a leader. In spite of their ostensible concern about the exploitation of women, these films present trafficking mostly as an occasion for the redemption and rehabilitation of the beleaguered white American male, appropriating the problem of trafficking in the service of a US-led neo-imperialism bolstered by masculinism and xenophobia, and implicitly problematising women's independence and justifying the control of their movements and sexuality.     

Gentrification in tourist cities: Evidence from New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina

Abstract

Tourism‐led redevelopment often provides city residents with increased opportunities for employment, leisure, and cultural enrichment, but it can also have dramatic and unpredictable effects on their lives. One of these effects involves the repercussions of redevelopment that transforms working‐class neighborhoods into middle‐ or upper‐class areas catering to tourists. We use the city of New Orleans as a case study to explore the connections between tourism and gentrification.

We first discuss the growth of tourism in New Orleans, paying particular attention to its geographic scope. We then consider the ways in which gentrification and tourism are connected in New Orleans and what their relationship adds to theories of tourism development and urban revitalization. The analysis concludes with an in‐depth look at one of the nation's oldest black neighborhoods, Tremé, where both tourism and the nonblack population have been increasing in recent years.     

The bounds of smart decline: a foundational theory for planning shrinking cities

Economic decline has led to a new wave of population decline throughout the US, meaning more and more cities are shrinking. Growing interest in using smart decline principles to respond to shrinkage has been met with controversy in cities such as Detroit and Cleveland. This paper advances a foundational theory of smart decline that takes as its starting point discussions of ethics, equity, and social justice in the planning and political theory literature, but is well grounded in observations of successful smart decline practice.     

Government Reform,Political Ideology,and Administrative Burden: The Case of Performance Management in the Bush Administration

This article examines how ideological differences between political officials and agencies may have affected the implementation of an ostensibly nonpartisan, government‐wide administrative initiative: the George W. Bush administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) review of federal programs. The analysis reveals that managers in agencies associated with liberal programs and employees (“liberal agencies”) agreed to a greater extent than those in agencies associated with conservative programs and employees (“conservative agencies”) that PART required significant agency time and effort and that it imposed a burden on management resources. Further analysis reveals that differences in reported agency effort can be explained partly by objective differences in the demands that PART placed on agencies—liberal agencies were required to evaluate more programs and implement more improvement plans relative to their organizational capacity—and partly by the ideological beliefs of employees—on average, liberal managers reported more agency effort, even after accounting for objective measures of administrative burden.     

Neoliberalism,embedded neoliberalism and neocorporatism: Towards transnational capitalism in Central-Eastern Europe

This article analyses the key features and origins of three variants of transnational capitalism emerging in Central-Eastern Europe: a neoliberal type in the Baltic states, an embedded neoliberal type in the Visegrád states, and a neocorporatist type in Slovenia. These regimes are characterised by their institutions and performances in marketisation, industrial transformation, social inclusion, and macroeconomic stability. Explanations for regime diversity are developed at two levels. First, it is argued that the legacies of the past, and their perceptions as either threats or assets to these countries' future, have had deep impact on regime types. Legacies and initial choices were no less crucial for the degree of democratic inclusion, and the different patterns of protest and patience on the paths towards the new regimes. Second, the article demonstrates the importance of transnational influences in industrial transformation and social inclusion.     

Several liability with sequential care: an experiment

European Journal of Law and Economics - By a laboratory experiment, we investigate the incentives of potential tortfeasors to make investments in order to reduce the probability of a given harm...     

Recodifying the Law: A Metalinguistic Inquiry into the Recodification of Belgian Law Between 2014–2019

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique - Legal scholars attribute a great deal of importance to the linguistic dimension behind...     

Measuring intra-generational redistribution in PAYG pension schemes

Public Choice - Voters in ageing societies expect pension reforms to be both inter-generationally and intra-generationally fair. In this paper, we propose a global measure of intra-generational...     

Brain arteriovenous malformation and its implication in forensic pathology

Despite the fact that brain arteriovenous malformations (BAVMs) are a possible cause of sudden and unexplained death, very few papers have discussed their importance in the forensic context. BAVMs consist of tangled masses of tortuous arteries and veins devoid of intervening capillaries that frequently extend from brain parenchyma into the subarachnoid space. Apart from BAVMs, three major groups of vascular malformations of the brain are known: cavernous hemangioma, venous angioma, and capillary telangiectasia. BAVMs and cavernous hemangioma often cause hemorrhages, while venous angioma and capillary telangiectasia are typically asymptomatic. Presented here is the case of a 14-year-old girl who died from a ruptured BAVM. The present case is a reminder that the forensic pathologist should be able to recognize BAVMs and to differentiate it from other types of vascular malformations. Although rare, it is a cause of sudden death not to be overlooked, especially in children.